I agree about AF being aware of the capacity for being swept away by fantasy - I suppose any novelist would have to be, but she writes so particularly well about ambivalent kinds of attraction, like Nicola and her decision never to go to another Mass. And your other post is entirely right on the whole Marlow-Merrick Gondal interest in the playing out of betrayal on a large scale, which, on the smaller scale one finds within families and boarding schools, AF is also a specialist.

Also, a propos of something either you or one of your commenters said, I do think Patrick's attitude to fantasy torture is to do with the Elizabethan Anthony Merrick, but also with a rather gruesome Catholic interest in the sufferings of the martyrs and saints which I remember from the nuns and various forms of religious rhetoric when I was little. Presumably Patrick would have been subjected to something similar, with his recusant heritage.